Outsmarting big pharma

Background
Advanced pharmaceuticals play an increasingly important role in modern health care. Besides funding R&D, the big pharma companies spend an even bigger part of their budget on marketing to maximize the revenues of their products. They aim to influence medical professionals as prescribers. As a result, pharma companies often achieve high volume growth and unusually high profit margins.
For hospitals in general, and our client in particular, the cost of these pharmaceuticals (particularly the very advanced and expensive ones – frequently biologicals) is rapidly increasing and forms a burden on their financials. How to regain control of the process that is more and more orchestrated by big pharma?

Why us
We demonstrated to a number of hospitals how to break the cycle of rising cost for expensive medication – with a plan tailored to the unique situation of each organisation. We helped the procurement department by aligning medical and non-medical professionals as an antidote for the invasive marketing efforts. Hence, we created the force to make a stand against big pharma, while improving patient care with the financial benefits from the effort.

Our involvement
Most recently, we assisted our client, a group of hospitals, to organise thematical, patient-centric care. Helping medical professionals from various disciplines to work together on when, how much and how long specific medication should ideally be applied. Multidisciplinary involvement, extra physician care and off-patent alternatives proved to limit high-dose treatment with unnecessarily expensive medication and unwanted side effects (esp. with immune therapy). This put the team of doctors and the hospital clearly in charge of how they wanted to provide treatment.

Subsequently we helped develop a negotiating strategy to minimize the cost-prize for the desired pharmaceuticals; including off-patent alternatives. The doctors together with the purchase department of the hospital group managed to get substantially lower prices – despite the much lower volume of purchase. Savings on pharmaceutical expense were partially re-invested in more contact between patients and medical professionals to further improve personal care.